When Lee Cohen isn’t working in International Development (see his Haiti blog for his most recent project) he takes pictures. Lots of them. Specifically, he takes pictures for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who are seeking ways of better telling their stories. See Partners for a list of organizations he’s worked with. Lee believes that an artificial division has been built in the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) of projects. NGOs often believe that solid M&E must EITHER be:
- Quantitative: Evaluations derived from collecting baseline data about a community, for example, then measuring that community at the conclusion of the project, seeing if the intervention had the desired effects the project had advertised. These evaluations are often flawed for a simple reason: the people conducting them are the same people who conducted the project, and who most likely want to keep their jobs. It is in their best interest, many times, to thus present favorable evidence that the project had the desired effect on a community. Nonetheless, the donor community (usually larger foundations, development banks, governments, etc.) demands this kind of information, so that NGOs are “held accountable”.
- Qualitative: Stories are gathered from “the field”, usually in some sort of combination of narrative writing and pictures, sent to the boss, who puts them on a website to show “first-hand” what’s happening in the field. These stories generally operate at the extremes: they are either triumphant or tragic. Triumphant stories usually describe how a community, using a combination of the NGOs project, and its own, proactive spirit, has changed dramatically for the better. Tragic stories usually describe horrific situations that require donors (usually smaller, individual donors or small foundations) to give money right away to “save” these people.
If we want to know why M&E so rarely captures the truth, we need only look in the mirror. NGOs are merely delivering numbers, pictures, and words that donors ask for. The job of any responsible donor is to probe more deeply into how one’s money will be spent, for what purpose, and how the NGO will track this purpose over time.
Lee likes NGOs that aren’t afraid of making mistakes. He likes NGOs that aren’t obsessed with keeping their operating budget under 5% so they can get a 4-star rating on Charity Navigator. He likes NGOs that acknowledge their own limitations, and that specialize at what they’re good at, as opposed to what they’d like to be good at. Lee likes taking pictures for these organizations. You can see some of those pictures here.
If you want to get in touch with Lee you can email him.